Sceptically, I lay down upon the ivory earth and waited for the baking heat of the white sands to swallow up my mind. With fingers blistered and peeling, I dug out a small hollow, at first perhaps just for something to drive away the demons, and then with an intensity forged by a cold, rageless passion; a physical embodiment of my secret joke - if the ground would not take me in spirit, then I would force an entrance, storm that sacred vessel as a last act of despair, a knight sullied with sins, atrophied with anguish and desperate to reclaim his rightful honour of atonement by storming the castle which made him, slaying those that would not forgive. And so I would be too! If I must die here in the desert, then I will at least have a burial. And perhaps the burning sands might slake my thirst, as some things which burn for so long eventually feel cool and cold. And those that would be angry with me for dying would not see my naked bones grotesque and embarrassed for lack of skin; they would not see anything at all.
Like a worm burrowing into the stomach of a dog, my failing body writhed with a peculiar reilsh, eyelids encrusted and bleary; swollen tongue rubbing sand into the sores of my gums until I had dug out no more than a helmut of a hole; and then tears, stupid, pointless tears, energy that might extend my life, the final fluids of my body gone; now dry like a teetotaller's liquor cabinet, like God's humour and me, with the white sands glowing pink as the restless sun gave birth to a thankless night of nevermores.
I bowed my head down and licked the last of the salty fluid from my cheeks. Words and visions filled me and at once my cracked and broken voice spilled out like light on that very first day - I was sick with it, like a drunk who held it in his guts for too long and now must purge whether he want it or no - all that I was and all that I am went forth from me as a gush of sound, a fissure in time from whence possibilities spring forth, and tiny whispers pooled there in that hole like inky dreams glassy with the reflection of self, rising, rising, overflowing and seeking exit on the wind, trying to find the moon and stars and someone else, somewhere else to make solid of their sorrow; but I cupped my hands and held them close, tipped them back into my hollow and continued, carefully, so carefully; for the Truth is a delicate thing.
The moon scraped her bloated self across the night and dawn reshaped the land. I lay there, still - whispering my faithless life until my throat bled and I was suddenly empty, finished.
Resting my sore head on the softly swirling sounds of my desert halo, I knew then that I was free. All these things which had kept me, all these infiltrations of serpentine magnitude vesseled up in my heart and held as Hell holds Satan - they were gone; they were thoughts and actions and certainly, they were pain; but it was debris never cleared, dead tissue not amputated for the simple sake of vanity and an overzealous concept of belonging to it! It was a folly of life not given over and not given up!
I should have died then. I should have melted into time as a mournful shadow which holds its liquid only in the weight of others, and to whom day is known as a resentment of light, and night is held as a Hell of sweeping indefinition. But I didn't die. I didn't perish, I didn't fall and I didn't fail. I lived.
I stood up from my rockpool of sorrow and left my abused shell of a body blank and unstaring beside. I felt the wind blow through me and tasted the history and wisdom in it's existence.
I pondered what to be next.
Like a worm burrowing into the stomach of a dog, my failing body writhed with a peculiar reilsh, eyelids encrusted and bleary; swollen tongue rubbing sand into the sores of my gums until I had dug out no more than a helmut of a hole; and then tears, stupid, pointless tears, energy that might extend my life, the final fluids of my body gone; now dry like a teetotaller's liquor cabinet, like God's humour and me, with the white sands glowing pink as the restless sun gave birth to a thankless night of nevermores.
I bowed my head down and licked the last of the salty fluid from my cheeks. Words and visions filled me and at once my cracked and broken voice spilled out like light on that very first day - I was sick with it, like a drunk who held it in his guts for too long and now must purge whether he want it or no - all that I was and all that I am went forth from me as a gush of sound, a fissure in time from whence possibilities spring forth, and tiny whispers pooled there in that hole like inky dreams glassy with the reflection of self, rising, rising, overflowing and seeking exit on the wind, trying to find the moon and stars and someone else, somewhere else to make solid of their sorrow; but I cupped my hands and held them close, tipped them back into my hollow and continued, carefully, so carefully; for the Truth is a delicate thing.
The moon scraped her bloated self across the night and dawn reshaped the land. I lay there, still - whispering my faithless life until my throat bled and I was suddenly empty, finished.
Resting my sore head on the softly swirling sounds of my desert halo, I knew then that I was free. All these things which had kept me, all these infiltrations of serpentine magnitude vesseled up in my heart and held as Hell holds Satan - they were gone; they were thoughts and actions and certainly, they were pain; but it was debris never cleared, dead tissue not amputated for the simple sake of vanity and an overzealous concept of belonging to it! It was a folly of life not given over and not given up!
I should have died then. I should have melted into time as a mournful shadow which holds its liquid only in the weight of others, and to whom day is known as a resentment of light, and night is held as a Hell of sweeping indefinition. But I didn't die. I didn't perish, I didn't fall and I didn't fail. I lived.
I stood up from my rockpool of sorrow and left my abused shell of a body blank and unstaring beside. I felt the wind blow through me and tasted the history and wisdom in it's existence.
I pondered what to be next.